Grey Owl
Archibald Stansfeld Belaney, commonly known as Grey Owl, was a popular Canadian writer, public speaker and conservationist. Born an Englishman, he immigrated to Canada and, in the latter years of his life, passed as half-Indian, falsely claiming he was the son of a Scottish man and an Apache woman. With books, articles and public appearances promoting wilderness conservation, he achieved fame in the 1930s. Shortly after his death in 1938, his real identity as the Englishman Archie Belaney was exposed. He has been called one of the first persons to engage in Indigenous identity fraud in Canada.
Moving to Canada as a young man, Belaney established himself as a woodsman and trapper, before rising to prominence as an author and lecturer. While working for the Dominion Parks Branch of Canada in the 1930s, Belaney was named the "caretaker of park animals", first at Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba and then at Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan. His views on wilderness conservation, expressed in numerous articles, books, lectures and films, reached audiences beyond the borders of Canada, bringing attention to the negative impact of exploiting nature and the urgent need to develop respect for the natural world. He was particularly concerned about the plight of the beaver, which by the 1920s had been hunted almost to extinction.
Recognition of Belaney includes biographies, academic studies, historic plaques in England, Ontario and Quebec, and a film based on his life, directed by Richard Attenborough.
Early life (18881906)
Archibald Stansfeld Belaney was born on September 18, 1888, in Hastings, England, into an upper-middle-class English family. His father was George Belaney and his mother Katherine "Kittie" Cox. His paternal grandfather had come from Scotland and married in England.Kittie was George Belaney's second wife. Before Archie's birth, George had immigrated to the United States with his then-wife Elizabeth Cox and her younger sister, Kittie. After Elizabeth's early death, George married 15-year-old Kittie. Within the year they returned to England in time for the birth of their son Archie. George was unable to settle down to steady employment and wasted much of the family's fortune on various unsuccessful business ventures. He agreed to return permanently to the United States in exchange for a small allowance. Archie remained in England in the care of his father's mother, Juliana Belaney, and his father's two younger sisters, Janet Adelaide Belaney and Julia Caroline Belaney, whom the boy would know as Aunt Ada and Aunt Carry. It was Aunt Ada who would come to dominate Archie's early life.
Belaney attended Hastings Grammar School, where he excelled in subjects such as English, French and chemistry. "He mixed little with the other students in class, or afterwards. The shy, withdrawn boy, ashamed of having been abandoned by his parents, lived largely in his own world." Outside school, he spent time reading and exploring St Helen's Wood near his home. He also collected snakes and other small animals. Belaney was known for pranks, such as using his chemistry set to make small bombs, which he called "Belaney Bombs". A family friend later recalled that he "used to come to our house in Quarry Road with his pockets full of snakes, and he was always keen on Red Indians and making wigwams the garden." "He used to make gunpowder and one Sunday he buried some in our garden and the explosion shook all the windows in the road. On another occasion he was cutting up phosphorus for gunpowder and set light to the curtains in the room."
Fascinated by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Belaney read about them and drew pictures of them in the margins of his books. He prepared maps showing the linguistic divisions in Canada and the locations of the tribes. His knowledge impressed his aunt Ada, who was "amazed at his knowledge of the detail... He was not interested in the romantic picture of the Indians but in their mastery over nature..."
Belaney left Hastings Grammar School and started working as a clerk in a lumber yard, where, on weekends, he and his friend George McCormick perfected knife throwing and marksmanship. He hated the job and ensured a sudden end to it by lowering a bag of fireworks down the chimney of the company's office. The resulting explosion almost destroyed the building. Although, in agreement with his aunt Ada, he was supposed to work longer in England, he was finally allowed to move to Canada, with the understanding he would "learn to be a farmer while he was getting used to the country".
On March 29, 1906, at the age of 18, Belaney boarded SS Canada for Halifax, Nova Scotia. Arriving on April 6, he went to Toronto, where, with no intention of becoming a farmer, he worked for some time in a retail shop.
First years in Canada (19061915)
Toronto held no appeal for Belaney, and he soon left, bound for Lake Temagami, one of the largest lakes in northern Ontario, and home of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai community. In 1907 he was working at the Temagami Inn as a "chore-boy". He returned home to Hastings for a short visit during the winter of 19071908, probably to ask for money from his aunts. He learned then that his father had been killed in a drunken brawl in the United States.Belaney returned to work at the Temagami Inn in 1908. He determined to lose the remaining traces of his English accent. At the Temagami Inn he met Angele Egwuna, who was working there as a kitchen-helper. She spoke little English and he little Ojibwe, but a friendship developed. Through Angele he also met members of her family, who called him "gitchi-saganash". Her uncle gave him the nickname "ko-hom-see", a name that would be transformed years later into "Grey Owl".
The Egwunas invited Belaney to spend the winter of 19091910 trapping with them in the bush to the east of the south arm of Lake Temagami, where he learned how the Temagami Ojibwe managed their hunting territories by killing only the animals that they needed and leaving the rest to reproduce. The time with the Egwunas improved both his proficiency with the Ojibwe language and the skills he needed to survive and make a living in the bush. Belaney would later report this as his "formal adoption" by the Ojibwe. The boy from Hastings was finally living the life he had dreamed of.
In the summers of 1910 and 1911, Belaney worked as a guide at Camp Keewaydin, an American boys’ camp on Lake Temagami. On August 23, 1910, he and Angele Egwuna were married on Bear Island in a Christian ceremony. In spring 1911 their daughter Agnes was born.
Little is known of Belaney's life in the winter of 19111912. He next surfaces, alone, in the summer of 1912 in Biscotasing. He worked in the surrounding area as a forest ranger during the summers of 19121914 and spent the winters in the bush on the trapline. In Bisco, Belaney began a relationship with Marie Girard, a Métis woman who worked as a maid in the boarding-house where he stayed. At his invitation she joined him on his trapline during the winter of 19131914.
There is no record of Belaney's life in the winter of 19141915. In June, 1915, he sailed for England with the Canadian Army. Marie Girard died of tuberculosis in the fall of 1915, shortly after giving birth to their son, John Jero.
In his first years in Canada, Belaney had established himself as a backcountry woodsman, with a keen appreciation of the wilderness. At some point he also began to develop the fiction of having been born in Mexico to a Scottish man and an Apache woman. His debut as husband and father had not been a success: "Archie kept falling deeper and deeper into personal problems of his own making, going from one crisis to another."
In the Canadian Army (19151917)
Belaney enlisted with the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force on May 6, 1915, during the First World War. In June he was shipped to England and initially assigned to the 23rd Reserve Battalion in Kent. He later joined the 13th Battalion, known as the Black Watch, and was shipped to the front line in France, where he served as a sniper. Fellow soldiers accepted his assumed Indian identity, with one writing that he "...saw him squirm up muddy hills in a way no white man could. He had all the actions and features of an Indian.... Never in all my life did I ever meet a man who was better able to hide when we would go out onto No Man's Land."Belaney was wounded in the right wrist on January 15, 1916. Then on April 23 he was shot in the right foot, a serious injury from which he never fully recovered. He was shipped back to England, where it was found necessary to amputate a toe. From November 1916 to March 1917, he convalesced in the Canadian Military Hospital in his home town of Hastings.
Encouraged by his aunts, Belaney renewed his childhood friendship with Ivy Holmes. Ivy, then 26, was an accomplished professional dancer, who had travelled extensively in Europe. Acquainted with her since childhood, he dispensed with the pretense of being Indian. She found that his stories about canoeing in Canada made the "backwoods sound terribly attractive". Belaney was silent about his wife and child back in Canada. They were married on February 10, 1917.
The couple decided that Belaney would return to Canada and establish himself near Biscotasing, then send for Ivy, who "looked forward to seeing his beloved wilderness". Exactly how he thought that plan would work out, with a legal wife and child no more than 100 kilometers away and a mistress in the same town, is a mystery. Belaney left for Canada on September 19, 1917. Ivy never saw him again. He wrote to her for a year until he finally admitted that he was already married. Ivy divorced him in 1922.
Back to Canada (19171925)
Belaney returned to Canada in September 1917, and was discharged from the army at the end of November. His most pressing concern was his wounded foot, which was painful and limited his mobilityan unfortunate prospect for someone who wanted to go back into the bush. In October he received treatment at a hospital in Toronto, but achieved little success. He had other worries: What to do about his first wife, Angele, and his daughter Agnes? What to do about his second wife, Ivy, still in England and expecting to be sent for? What to do about his illegitimate son, Johnny, born to his deceased mistress Marie? After meeting with Angele, he returned to Biscotasing at the end of 1917, alone.Belaney soon gained a reputation for drunkenness and disorderly conduct in Bisco. Despite this, he made a favorable impression on many people, one person recalling " liked immensely this endearing rebel. Archie was one of the nicest things that happened to me when I was growing up."
Belaney spent much of 1918 recuperating and gradually regained control of his right foot, but the disability remained for the rest of his life, with his foot sometimes swelling to twice its normal size. He did not approach Johnny and the boy did not learn who his father was till years later. He finally admitted to Ivy that he was already married, which ended their relationship. Now he had a new worry: His aunts were furious with him and regarded his treatment of Angele and Ivy as "nothing less than diabolical".
In the summer of 1919, Belaney worked on a survey party in the bush. A co-worker recalled "The 'Mexican half-breed' had an unattractive side. 'He was taciturn and morose, with a violent, almost maniacal temper.
His best friends in Bisco were the Espaniels, an Indigenous family with whom he lived in the early 1920s. He joined them for two winters trapping at Indian Lake on the east branch of the Spanish River. Belaney also maintained a cabin on his hunting ground nearby at Mozhabong Lake. His command of the Ojibwe language benefited from this time with the Espaniels, and he also learned the "Indian way of doing things"which in Jim Espaniel's words "the white man calls conservation".
In the summers of 1920 and 1921, he worked as the deputy forest ranger on the Mississagi Forest Reserve.
Worried about the logging of Ontario's remaining old-growth pine forests, Belaney wanted the Mississagi area made into a park. In a fledgling attempt at conservationism, he posted signs saying "GOD MADE THIS COUNTRY FOR THE TREES DON’T BURN IT UP AND MAKE IT LOOK LIKE HELL" and "GOD MADE THE COUNTRY BUT MAN DESTROYED IT".
Inspired by his boyhood reading of authors such as Fenimore Cooper and Longfellow, Belaney invented his own elaborately choreographed "war dance", which "...surprised the local Ojibwa and Cree for, as fur buyer Jack Leve put it, 'The Bisco Indians didn't know his brand of Indian lore. Local reactions to the war dance were mixed, with some people saying it was good fun, while others said it was just an excuse for drinking. Some Indigenous men joined in, while others thought the dance was evil.
Belaney's big day arrived on Victoria Day, May 23, 1923. The Sudbury Star reported: "War Dance Given at Biscotasing. A Big Celebration Held on Victoria Day. In honour of the good queen to which his grandfather and namesake had sent his epic poem, The Hundred Days of Napoleon, Archie put on the greatest war dance of his life."
In April, 1925, an arrest warrant was issued for Belaney after a particularly egregious piece of misbehaviour. Soon after, he left Bisco for good, returning to Temagami and taking up again with Angele, who bore him a second daughter, Flora, in 1926. Amazingly, there is no record of Angele ever reproaching him for his treatment of her, and she appeared to accept his wayward conduct to the end. In the fall of 1925, she saw him off at the train stationand never saw him again. By then, Belaney had already begun his fourth relationship.